Mathieu Copeland: A Staged Exhibition

Performer: Jennifer Lacey
Composition and music: Laetitia Sadier (assisted by Hannes Plattmeier)
With Art & Language, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Robert Barry, Luis Camnitzer, Braco Dimitrijević, Coco Fusco, Giovanna, Joseph Grigely, Swetlana Heger, Florence Jung, Ghislaine Leung, David Medalla, Michael Portnoy
Backdrop: Gaylen Gerber

An exhibition by Mathieu Copeland.

Pursuing his investigation into the nature of an exhibition, curator Mathieu Copeland transposes the exhibition to the stage for the duration of a show. Descriptions of dreamed, real, or vanished artworks written by a dozen artists for A Staged Exhibition are interpreted through gestures, words and music by choreographer and dancer Jennifer Lacey and composer and musician Laetitia Sadier against a backdrop by Gaylen Gerber.

Following A Choreographed Exhibition, presented at the Contemporary Art Centre in 2008, and the book and the festival Choreographing Exhibitions in 2013, curator Mathieu Copeland returns to La Ferme du Buisson with A Staged Exhibition (Une exposition mise en scène). Working with the theatre’s spatial and temporal parameters, Copeland experiments and collaborates with Lacey and Sadier to interrogate the way works are articulated from one to the other, confronted in their singularity and interpreted as a tableau vivant that transposes works by an international and intergenerational grouping of artists including Art & Language, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Robert Barry, Luis Camnitzer, Braco Dimitrijević, Coco Fusco, Giovanna, Joseph Grigely, Swetlana Heger, Florence Jung, Ghislaine Leung, David Medalla and Michael Portnoy.

Jennifer Lacey pursues her investigation in breaking free from the spectacular to find a playful and inventive hermeneutics of the body as she performs written or described works commissioned specifically for A Staged Exhibition. Laetitia Sadier enters into resonance, or dissonance, with the exhibition taking place in parallel to offer a sound exhibition within a staged one. In a minimalist setting, American artist Gaylen Gerber creates—for the first time in his career—a work for a theatrical context. Invited to reinterpret what a theatrical backdrop can be, Gerber continues his decades-long exploration of Backdrops and how they draw attention to the works presented and to their presentation.

Shedding the physical reality of the object, A Staged Exhibition focuses on the emotional experience of a work, lived in the present tense as an exhibition that exists solely through the prism of the lived actions. Fundamentally influenced by the art of Robert Barry—whose own oeuvre conveys the feeling of art without ever fully revealing it—A Staged Exhibition offers the mediation of works of art that occur only in their interpretation.

In partnership with the Galerie UQO - Université du Québec en Outaouais.

With the support of Fluxus Art projects.